Saturday Night Live Faces Backlash for Adoptee Parody

When South Korea’s Saturday Night Live ran a skit over the weekend parodying a grown-up adoptee’s reunion with his Korean birth mother, the producers said they didn’t mean to offend.

But since the broadcast many on Twitter have criticized SNL Korea for poking fun at the character’s accent and cultural disconnect.

In the pre-taped skit, comedian Kim Doo-young plays a Korean adoptee at a reunion with his birth mother, whose face isn’t shown. He reads a letter out loud in heavily broken Korean and makes exaggerated facial expressions. His slurred speech, incorrect word choices and coarse language bring laughter from the studio audience.

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“If you abandon your child, you get punished,” he tells his mother, using a pejorative term for child. He also performs a botched taekwondo routine.

A spokeswoman for CJ E&M Corp., which owns the local network that broadcasts SNL Korea, said the company regrets any offense caused by the skit.

“Satire can tackle darker social issues, too. The message was to bring out remorse about the painful past and reality,” the spokeswoman quoted the producers as saying.

Many Korean children were sent overseas for adoption following the Korean War as the country recovered from the conflict. During the rapid economic recovery that followed, thousands more were sent for international adoption.

The country’s health ministry said 165,367 children were adopted by overseas parents from 1958 to 2012.

The adoptee clip wouldn’t be uploaded to the series’ official YouTube channel, the spokeswoman said.

Saturday Night Live Korea has been criticized before for using actors with painted faces to represent other ethnicities.